


there is an old cliché under your monet (baby)

by crimson_noir



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, Natasha Romanov Lives, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Parties!, Spies & Secret Agents, Team Bonding, Tony Stark Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22224499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimson_noir/pseuds/crimson_noir
Summary: A spy over the years, at various galas, in various ballrooms. She tries on different gowns and states of mind as she goes through her life, and maybe people can be more than one thing.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Avengers Team
Kudos: 10





	there is an old cliché under your monet (baby)

**Author's Note:**

> Title shamelessly stolen from The Killers' 'Believe Me Natalie.'

**Bucharest**

“You do know your mark, right?”

The voice isn’t Russian, isn’t a person perfecting their English, isn’t Red Room. She wonders why she’s focusing on the fact like a starved person. She knows why she is.

“I do.”

Her own voice isn’t Russian, isn’t a person perfecting their English, but is Red Room. It’s Red Room in the way the words are precise, clipped enough to be cold but not enough to be disrespectful. It’s Red Room in the way it’s not hindered by the virtue of coming through an earpiece.

“Well, I guess you aren’t the KGB’s best for nothing.”

She isn’t the KGB’s best. That was always the Winter Soldier, Communism’s triumph, with the metal arm with the blood-red star blooming on the shoulder, (an announcement of who he served, in her opinion, and hence, downright foolish) with the ‘economical movement’ and the highest kill rate in the records. But the Winter Soldier had never struck her as fully theirs; it was like he was bound to something else, another handler, some other reality. If that was correct, she supposes she is the only thing the KGB has left, but even that isn’t fully accurate. The KGB is just what signs the paycheques, the one who makes the enemies. She is the Red Room’s. In a way, she will always be.

Back to the mission and the little irritations of it—a chatty handler is something she can handle quite easily, the deep v at the chest doesn’t hurt while talking to people (in the US, she’d be picked up on a prostitution charge), and the mission, once stripped down to its bones, is one she’s been running again and again since she turned twelve; simple.

But the ballroom hurts her eyes, the bright, obscene gold of it, the chandeliers that aren’t lit up by candles with the stray wax dripping onto the floor but electrical bulbs, small, elegant ones, the people who don’t like the wine carelessly tipping it into the potted plants and really, who is she to think about the kids rolled up into blankets, so many of them, like the meagre heat would save them? Who is she to have taken a detour a few months ago, completing the mission early to scrape her knuckles along the Wall? She’s not a philanthropist. She’s not an optimist.

“All of you are these days the best ones for these kind of jobs. Who would’ve known, a few years ago?”

 _A girl’s gotta make a living_ , she thinks about saying, flipping to an American accent, all false cheer just to surprise the handler. She doesn’t do it. The consequences would be major for the small amount of satisfaction she’d get. Yelena would’ve done it, probably. Whatever.

She picks a champagne glass off a waiter’s gleaming tray, smiling at him as she does, noting the eyes that attach themselves to her at the gesture, spots her target staring at her with all the subtlety of a drunk teenager. He’s supposed to be some famous art dealer, and there is no sense in wanting him dead, but well, she’s been outsourced to people who take their enemies seriously, it seems. She stops to talk to a few people, standing in clear view (if she’s lucky enough, hear the nonsense she’s spouting about fraud and the art world being not as reliable as it used to be, you know, back then) so that he can see her.

“It seems like you’re not talking to the right people, darling,” says her target, coming up behind her. He has no concept of personal space, breathing into her neck.

“That was fast,” says the chatty handler approvingly.

“Oh dear,” she sighs, outwardly starstruck. The dealer takes it as his due. (In what world do _art dealers_ have such huge egos?) “I _do_ hate to be making such terrible mistakes.”

“Beautiful people don’t make mistakes,” he says, hand hovering mere inches away from the blonde hair that spills over her back. “I could introduce you.”

His whisky glass is in his left hand. She slides a hand down his forearm as if admiring the muscle. There’s a nerve agent in her ring. Slow-acting, because they want him to die in his own house. Her hand settles on his, just over the drink. All he’s looking at is down the front of her dress. She tips her little finger just so, and the pill falls into the drink, instantly dissolving. She leans up to whisper in his ear.

“I think you’re the best person for the job.” She makes it husky, full of innuendo. And then she takes a seductive sip of her champagne, biting her lower lip, looking at him through her blonde-dyed lashes.

He downs the whisky.

**Vienna**

The piano is almost obnoxiously loud, and they’re playing Beethoven. Goddamn it.

“This place has no class,” she mutters to Barton. (“Call me Clint,” he’d said, when she’d been accepted for S.H.I.E.L.D as a field agent, finally, but she has trouble thinking of him that way, like he’s a friend; she doesn’t know him well enough.)

“I’m sorry, I do believe I’m drinking very good alcohol while wearing an actual fucking tailored suit,” he answers, looking at her with comically narrowed eyes. “How high _are_ your standards?”

“Oh, you don’t want to know. Why are you on this mission anyway? It’s a simple pick and drop. I could do it myself. Hell, one of the junior agents could do it themselves.” Maybe the irritation in her tone is a giveaway, but she is irritated about it. She knows she’s competent, more clearly than a lot of other things.

“You’re putting too much faith in S.H.I.E.L.D’s young, hon,” he sighs, tugs at the clean silk of his tie impatiently. “I’m here because the higher-ups still do not trust you.”

“Who, the WSC?” She knows the way she said it was too sharp, but she wants sharp, these days. She misses her team, back in Russia. “I didn’t know I was important enough to be looked at by those sycophants. Just an average spy here, nothing to worry about.” She knows the conversation’s a monitored one, that S.H.I.E.L.D knows everything they’re saying till the mission ends. She doesn’t care. If she were any angrier about it, she’d direct her complaints to AD Hill, shoot a few rounds into the Director’s desk. She’s controlling her temper, though.

She knows she should be grateful. They could’ve killed her, after all, _Barton_ could’ve killed her, it was his mission, but instead he brought her in with some bullshit about ‘assets’ and ‘irreplaceable experience.’ And they took her in. Sure, the hallways fall silent when she walks them, the silence smoking of something heavier than plain respect, but she can handle that. They can’t fault her for anything other than her past, and her past is long gone. By being S.H.I.E.L.D, she can be somewhere close to redemption.

Not that she wants it, but the sentiment is helpful to have when one wants to lie through their teeth in the middle of the cafeteria to get their food, and cannot resort to weapons.

“The sarcasm in your voice is truly staggering,” Barton smirks at her. “You can’t pretend that you don’t know you’re a legend, Nat.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. It doesn’t have as much of a bite to it as she’d like it to, but Barton flinches, perhaps involuntarily, anyway. She feels guilty for precisely a second before she tamps down on it ruthlessly. “It shouldn’t be true, the fact that I’m respected for all I’ve done.” Feared, okay. The fear is fine. It’s only rational to be scared of an assassin, unless you somehow think you’re better than them, which isn’t true in this case.

“Do you regret it?”

“You regret decisions when you had a choice in making those decisions,” she straightens her gown that doesn’t need straightening. Useless, as always. “I would never have been able to escape the Red Room without outside assistance. I would never have been able to stop them taking me in when they did. So no, I can’t regret it. I did the best I could.”

“It must’ve been hard,” he murmurs. He’s looking at the people milling in the gigantic space, leaning against the bar. The Amazing Hawkeye, she thinks, observing the way everything about his posture is utterly relaxed, except for his darting eyes. He’s a legend too, and he chooses to ignore it. Perhaps they have more in common than she thought.

“Survival always is.” She looks at the marble floor. The flowy skirt of the gown prevents her from a glimpse of her shoes. “Where’s your bow in this getup?”

“Don’t have one, you know they’re huge, can’t tuck one in a suit pocket, unfortunately. I wish I could wear gowns. You could probably sneak a tank under there and no one would notice.”

The comment startles a laugh out of her. “I stick to guns.”

He sets his glass down with a subdued clink. “And those scary goddamn knives.”

“Those scary goddamn knives,” she agrees, tasting the joke on her tongue. The earpiece crackles.

“Kiddos, if you’re done with your banter—”

 _Sitwell_ , Barton mouths. She recognized him, too. She likes this, she realizes, each handler having their own distinct personality, trusting (not completely, of course) the little voice in one’s ear.

“Direct your attention to the West entrance, where our guy’s entering with a handful of his girlfriends—”

**Tokyo**

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she says into her earpiece. “Seriously, Coulson? I am wearing a bloody Vera Wang and you’re saying that I have to run?”

“I never said you have to run, exactly, Agent Romanoff. You could shoot them.”

“Physical exertion in a gown is still physical exertion in a gown, no matter what the semantics are,” she hisses. “I will have someone’s _balls_ for this addition.”

“Your vocabulary has certainly benefited from Agent Barton’s company. You’ve ruined plenty of fancy dresses before.”

“Oh, I know of my cold reputation and the way I’d do anything to get the job done. This is a coloured wedding dress, and it will not allow me to get the job done. There is tulle everywhere, it’s fucking ruched at the waist, and I’d burn it gladly, I swear I would, but I am at a very populated fundraiser at the moment.”

“Is it that time of the month?”

“Oh, fuck you. I just want something I can move in.”

On the other end, Coulson sighs. “I cannot do anything about this, I’m sorry.” There is a slight hesitation before he says, “You’ll still be able to do it, won’t you?”

“I will,” she answers tiredly. “Just tell people not to expect this thing in good condition. It’s expensive.”

“You don’t need to worry about S.H.I.E.L.D’s resources, Agent. We gave it to you very well knowing what the consequences could be.”

It’s funny that they’re talking this seriously about a dress. But then again, she thinks, skating a hand over the fabric and the unholy amount of ruffles, it’s expensive. She’d value it at well above 75k. She doesn’t want to know the actual price.

It’s not that she is one of those ‘burn the rich’ people, she’s okay with the rich and with luxuries being luxuries and she’s grown well used to the fact that there are some things that a major percentage of the population will never be allowed to lay their eyes on. Her job being her job, she’s lived and lied at both extremes. It just is shocking sometimes, the wide gulf that exists. She can’t do anything about it, she knows, but she should try. As ghastly as the Red Room was, at least she got three square meals a day, and blankets (when they weren’t on a mission during which food or warmth wasn’t available), and a part of her feels terrible about the kids that didn’t.

The other part just carries on.

(She’s not a philanthropist.)

“You should’ve had Barton do this. Or one of your other agents.”

Coulson doesn’t respond.

She’s more than proved herself at S.H.I.E.L.D, and she remembers the days when she first came to the organization, the days when she had virtually no relation to any of her colleagues, the days when all she did was feel the weight of hundreds of eyes on her whenever she tried to do anything. She still feels them, of course, but they aren’t hostile anymore. Not the way they were then, blaming her for things she didn’t even know, for deaths that she might not have caused, for anything and everything, really. Some of them have even asked her for tips.

She declines a young man who asks her for a dance with a smile. She feels bad for the poor things, sometimes, coming up to someone who was only going to refuse. But then their lives move on and so does hers, so really, how is any of this important?

(This, what she’s doing, is important, because it’s effectively nullifying a drug dealer who was ruining lives for quite a lot of people in South, South-East Asia, and compared to this pale brunette who just walked away from her, she’s doing quite a lot for the society, but there are many people who wouldn’t agree. Many people who would say that she’s taking away countless others’ sources of income, perhaps even taking away the only way they coped. She doesn’t know. She knows what she’s doing is important but she doesn’t know if it’s _right_. Sometimes she wonders if she’s the bad guy in the metaphorical superhero movie that is life, only no one’s told her about it. Yet.)

“Following target now,” she says, eyes on a man in a white suit. It’s expensive, probably, definitely, this man wouldn’t want to broadcast an image that could be taken as weak or cheap but it’s not well-tailored, which probably led to a lot of sniggers behind his back, a lot of sniggers he heard, because you keep your ears open in the kind of job he has, the kind of operation he runs. So that means he’s angry, irrational if she’s lucky. Which means he’ll probably count it as a blessing if a woman apparently eager to suck on something other than a cherry wand followed him into the men’s toilets. It’s a testament to the utter morons that people are made by sex; she’s seduced so many of her marks before eliminating them.

The gun is reassuringly heavy when she pulls it out of the thigh holster.

**Sydney**

“The Widow’s on the move, sir,” the S.H.I.E.L.D agent says, his hands twitching to hold the earpiece in like he used to. No need to do that on these ones, he thinks, they’re Stark-made and hence better, and if you put your hand up to your ear for no reason, you’re just being obvious. And obvious is S.H.I.E.L.D’s worst enemy. Worse than anything, they’re an intelligence agency. Perhaps even worse than HYDRA.

“Good,” says the handler shortly. His voice is curiously untraceable. Bland. The agent, tucked in a shadowy corner of the ballroom, hesitates before speaking into his earpiece again. “What exactly do I do now? Is there any way I can help?”

“None at all, Agent,” replies the handler, sounding amused. “They’re the Avengers. They’ll be just fine at a gala hosted to honour them for their contributions to world peace, and they’ll be just fine on a battlefield against alien foe.”

“Why am I here, then?” he knows this might be whining, and completely against good S.H.I.E.L.D agent conduct, but there was nothing to be done about it, because he was tired, the suit he was wearing was not comfortable and he’d DVR’d a lot of America’s Next Top Model that he had planned to watch over the weekend. The weekend which had been taken over by his moronic employers. And he couldn’t even pick up a chick in this place stuffed to bursting with gorgeous chicks if he didn’t know how to smize, like, at all, he was just going to have to start a passive aggressive protest and stop doing his paperwork, they could not treat an employee like this—

“I knew that would come up sooner or later and let’s just say that you’re shadowing an excellently working team and noting down their tactics in a diplomatic situation so that you can use that among real life at S.H.I.E.L.D, with your colleagues. We would benefit a lot from such smooth working, you know.”

This was a thing he’d thought a lot about! He even put forward team-building activities or immediate team counselling to his superior, but she’d just looked at him from over the tops of her sunglasses with her perfect designation and her delicate weapons access and her shiny blonde hair and said, “Oh, fuck off now, won’t you?”

But this guy—this handler, he was getting it. It was very gratifying, really, and he wished he knew who the handler was, but he didn’t know. It wasn’t a voice he’d talked to ever before. He’d heard stories of a curiously unflappable handler before, stories of Phil Coulson, the guy who apparently handled both Hawkeye _and_ The Widow, and if that wasn’t the mark of a superhuman, he didn’t know what was. But Coulson was dead, dead due to Loki (he died a hero’s death, but that didn’t make it any less shocking), and even if he _were_ alive because of some weird magic or something, Phil Coulson wouldn’t handle someone as ordinary as him with his ANTM marathon. It made him happy, really, that there were people like him to handle people like the Avengers.

Not really people, though, as much as PR might try, they were just…bigger.

It was in the way they fought, in the way they assisted clean-up, in the way they had to be dragged to the med-bay, in the way you’d find one of them lurking around the Helicarrier and then two and then three and then the whole band would descend (not that he’d know, he was just a Level Two S.H.I.E.L.D agent, he hadn’t even properly seen the Helicarrier), in the way Dr Bruce Banner was Dr Bruce Banner and The Hulk was The Hulk, in the way Thor smelled of the monsoon wind and talked like thunderstorms, in the way Captain America smiled all the time around the junior agents like he couldn’t do anything else, in the way Hawkeye was Clint to all the agents but they almost never met his eyes, in the way Tony Stark rolled his eyes and lasered Fury’s desk apart, in the way the Black Widow moved at the shooting range and then turned to her audience, and in the space of her movements, she became Agent Romanoff.

Most people didn’t notice, but the two things were different.

“Why do you guys still call her the Black Widow, even publicly? I mean, wasn’t that her codename with the KGB?”

A breath over the line. “I see someone’s been listening in to storytime.”

“She’s a legend,” he answers.

“Don’t you worry about it,” says the handler, flippant, “go have some champagne. It’ll be very good, I promise you, and this is neither the first nor the last time you’ll be expendable on a mission.”

**New York**

She smiles at one of the Society Ladies as they talk to her teammates (and her by extension, she supposes, but she’s too bored to care), her arm linked loosely with Bruce’s and Thor’s arm slung around both of their shoulders while Clint hovers at her back, and he could put his chin on her shoulder, which is covered by Thor’s arm, and he’s just immature enough to do it, thunder god be damned. Tony isn’t in their little hug/huddle because he’s at the bar getting everyone drinks that she’s sure will be inappropriate cocktails, and Steve isn’t there because Tony couldn’t be bothered to carry those drinks now, could he?

Her boys. So foolish.

She never realized when she started thinking of them as her boys but she does, it’s too late to rectify that because it has sunk under her skin, somewhere into her brain and she’s pretty sure it started as a joke.

“Should I sing?” Thor is asking Clint, too seriously for this stage in the proceedings, and if Thor’s serious about it, it will happen, come on, they haven’t even had the first glass yet. She would like to be at least slightly liquored up when the musicals start, thanks very much. And in the now very likely event that singing happens, she would like Clint to sing, because he can sing well.

He’s sung Adele to her when she was sick, Frank Sinatra while making late-night coffee once, never Bruce Springsteen but definitely Bob Dylan, Carly Rae Jepsen in the middle of a mission. Blondie leaning over the roof of Stark Tower, warbling out _E-motions come I don’t know why_ while she stood behind him, terrified he was going to let himself fall, that the guilt had overtaken him, that Phil’s death had been too much, too much.

She would’ve done anything to save him from himself, back then, to tell him it was not his fault, but she couldn’t. He’d had to be his own superhero. Sometimes, she isn’t entirely sure he succeeded. But it’s okay. She’s— _they’re_ there for him. It’s overwhelming, seeing plural people in her corner. But she can roll with the punches, adapt to the changes. She’d be a shit spy if she couldn’t. (It’s better when the changes are ones she doesn’t entirely hate.)

Back to the present, Bruce is trying to convince them not to sing in this very fancy party for endangered whales or something. “They’re only endangered because rich people like the ones standing in this very pit like to eat them,” he grouses, and then gets back to the point when he sees the jubilation in Thor and Clint’s faces, “And, yeah, you still cannot sing the soundtrack to goddamn _Rent_ here. No, not at all.”

“The Lion King?” Clint wheedles.

Thor, who has seen the movie (there was crying when ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’ happened, which surprised the shit out of everyone because that’s a happy number, right, but then Thor said, “Loki,” in an almost-broken voice and everyone knew. But they didn’t skip the song. Or any part of the movie, no matter if it hurt, because, in the sage words of Steve Rogers, ‘they could not be defeated by an animated kids movie, damn it’) and is Thor, very pleadingly asks “Hakuna Matata?”

Bruce drops his head in his hands. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

She grins. “You’re a genius, you’ll figure it out.”

“We have alcohol!” Tony gestures to the tray in an amused Steve’s hands like a showman. “Bruce, here’s your Bud Light, you fucking philistine, Thor, yours is the whitish dick-shaped one, it’s called, for some reason that I refuse to contemplate a Slutty Rainbow—”

“It’s because when you move a rainbow-coloured disc real fast you get white and then there’s the fact that it looks like fanfic ejaculate, and the fact that the glass is literally shaped like a dick,” Clint says, highly entertained, to Thor’s questioning face. “Tony refuses to contemplate it because he’s a genius who doesn’t appreciate dumb people jokes.”

“No, because I’m a genius who refuses to appreciate terrible sex jokes,” Tony shoots back, “Merida, you’ve got a Purple Nipple with just a bit of a twist, Oh Captain My Captain, you’ve got the classic Suck, Bang, Blow with specially doctored alcohol because you _have_ to get drunk, and Natasha, here’s your classy Sex On The Beach.”

“I cannot believe that you said ‘Purple Nipple with just a bit of a twist’ right after you said you don’t do terrible sex jokes,” Bruce tells him, laughing. Clint’s been giggling since Tony said ‘nipple,’ and now he’s losing it. She privately thinks it’s a miracle nothing’s spilled from his glass yet.

“Hey, it was a pun. Terrible sex _puns_ are absolutely fine.”

“Oh my God,” says Steve, his face colouring. “I didn’t get it, before.” He takes a gulp of his cocktail to get over it, and looks delightedly at the little umbrella.

“What are you drinking?” She asks Tony, who smirks at her, raises his glass in a toast.

“A Negroni.”

She barely refrains from saying _I’m going to make you do a blowjob shot later, you wily bastard_ when his watch lets out a discreet beep. His face changes. “Someone’s trying to crash our party.”

“Isn’t the first time I’ve fought with a drink in my hand,” Clint drawls as a drone-robot crashes in through the huge windows, “Won’t be the last.”

**Los Angeles**

The team’s a mess.

She can feel it, as they all stand at least six inches apart (basically, as far apart from each other as they can without PR being pissed) in their finery, with the glaring absence of Bruce and Thor, lost to space after the Ultron debacle. None of the ‘new’ Avengers are here, the invite was for the old gang, the Battle of New York gang, or what was left of it. Almost nothing’s left of that team.

Steve’s been drawn out of his Winter Soldier search for this event (it’s important, a military gala. Why it’s in LA is baffling, but no one really cares enough to poke around, not even her) and Tony out of his own self-loathing. Clint didn’t want to come, at all, said he’d had enough of these events where no one did anything and all they did was waste money and congratulate themselves over and over again. She, herself, had had to close her eyes when she found the heavy stationery of the invite in her hands. She hadn’t wanted to think about how everything was slowly dripping away, revealing the cracks in the Avengers, cracks that none of them had thought about.

It is such a perilous thing to believe you are strong.

The media focuses on it, too, pointing out that they aren’t in the same city, are rarely seen together, have left the superheroing to others. It has been singularly vicious, and she is glad for her disguises every single time she goes outside. At least Clint can hide, too. Steve and Tony, not so much. It’s one of the many reasons why they’re both the worst of them all. She expects one of them to go off suddenly, like a bomb. She just hopes it won’t be here, in front of so much breakable glass, so many breakable _people_. In knowing that they are heroes, they forget that they are weapons, too.

She never does. (She’s not an optimist.) That was one of the many things that the Red Room taught her, and good spies don’t forget anything. She knows she should be thinking of herself as an agent, and every now and then she manages to, but most of the time she’s a spy—the same word, negative connotation.

“All that superhero stuff,” Yelena would say, “so why doesn’t the way you think about yourself change?”

It’s not free therapy for your sins, being a hero to the people. Rather the opposite, sometimes.

“This is a disaster,” Clint says under his breath, coming up to put an arm around her waist for a photo. “Can we leave now?”

“This is just the red carpet to the festivities,” she answers. “So shut up and don’t you dare wrinkle the dress.” The thing’s made of silk, cobalt blue silk, and the skirt’s very Cinderella. She doesn’t hate it at all. She won’t keep it though, no use in keeping something pretty like this when all your occasions turn into bloodbaths. (Maybe not _bloodbaths_ , she’s only being dramatic, but the point stands.)

The flashes are a lot. She keeps smiling through them.

“You’re acting as if I haven’t had to safeguard so many of your dresses,” he replies. “Remember St. Petersburg, the weird paint job?”

Her smile twitches genuine for a split second. That had been a crazy weekend too many years ago. “Yeah, that was fun. Still want to kill half of S.H.I.E.L.D for allowing that to happen.”

“Ah, I know. It was too James Bond to be anything but embarrassingly gauche.”

“Fancy words, Mr. Barton.”

“Shut up.” He shifts, uneasy. “Um. You can feel it, can’t you, the team being…”

“Don’t insult me, of course I know.”

“It’s just that—” He sighs. She knows very well how he feels. There aren’t words for it. Perhaps they’d all come to rely on the team more than they thought they did, she thinks, looking up the carpet at Steve, whose smile is so toothpaste commercial it’s almost convincing, whose posture is stiff enough to rival an actual wall. What have they done to themselves?

“Let’s go inside,” she says. “I’m sure there’ll be entertainment.”

They walk in together, Steve already having reached and swallowed up in a huge crowd of people who want to meet Captain America. She almost can’t see him, but there’s the fact that he’s at least a head taller than the tallest in the bunch, which helps. He’s quiet, smiling with an effort, as everyone chatters around him and she remembers how at parties like these, they’d all needed Tony’s help to navigate. She could manage, sure, but these people are _hungry_ for the Avengers and their celebrity in a way that she didn’t encounter in her missions, where she’s just another person in the throng.

There are people around them, too, a lot of them, and she just smiles and nods her head and neither of them are talking, but these people are acting like they are. She hears the clink of the Iron Man armour on stone. The ballroom turns as a whole as Tony steps out, pristine in a suit and sunglasses that she knows hide the shadows under his eyes, someone serving him a drink the second the metal retreats from his skin.

Group photo time, then.

**London**

She styles her dyed hair over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. She doesn’t wear a very eye-catching gown—it’s just bland, enough in the latest style to be respectable, and wholly forgettable. It’s what she’s going for, she knows, as she sees her reflection in the mirrored wall that the ballroom boasts. She doesn’t look stunning, but she won’t be kicked out, either. She doesn’t look like the sort of woman you’d want to ask for a dance and she doesn’t look repugnant. It’s perfect.

Her eyes are shaded by contacts, her skin tone is different, and some skilful make-up completely changed the contours of her face. She doesn’t look like herself at all. (Still, in the back of her mind, she’s making up contingencies for if he notices.)

Steve had said, “You need to check up on Tony, you’re the only one who can,” as Barnes had sat and stared at his cup of tea listlessly. Sometimes she thought that Barnes couldn’t keep up with what Steve wanted him to be, and sometimes she thought they were best friends. Were the two things related? She didn’t really know. Were they hurting each other? Of course they were.

(Was Steve expecting too much? Yes.)

She’d barely managed to not pull a gun on Barnes when he found her polishing her knives one night. He’d snuck up on her. She’d looked at him and seen a tired face, a tired man, and no trace of the hard set of the Winter Soldier’s face. She’d said, “I have coffee if you want some.” He’d nodded his head, and as she set up the ancient coffeemaker in their hideout, he’d said, “We did a wrong thing, I think. To Stark. Those were his parents; I think he was justified to be angry.”

Steve never told her what happened in Siberia. She didn’t want to know. Barnes never told her, either, but there were enough clues in his guilt-fuelled talking.

Yes, she thinks, looking at the crowd of well-dressed people, smelling the thousand different perfumes. He was justified to be angry.

Why’s Steve so concerned, though, concerned enough to send her here? It’s probably because he likes to know how the cards lie, probably because he wants her away to talk to T’Challa about the Accords. She’s still in favour. She still thinks that staying together is more important than how they do it. She just got caught up in her own loyalties, the worst thing a spy can ever do.

Clint’s fine in house arrest. She thinks it’s good for him and bad for him at the same time—his children and Laura will see him more continuously than they ever have in their lives, and she thinks he’ll like that, too. But he and his stubborn pride won’t like the fact that it’s been imposed upon him. She personally thinks that’s stupid. He should take any time he can get, snatch it away jealously, treat it as a prize. Who knows how long they’ll live?

She knows that she’s one of the people Tony’s most angry at—she betrayed him, didn’t she—she knows that he should not see her. But she still wants to go up to him and say that it’ll be okay. She doesn’t, because she had self-preservation written into her, and that would just be another lie to a man who’s been destroyed by them.

She stands in the corner of the room and misses Bruce. Bruce would’ve averted this, somehow, because he didn’t like tensions, he didn’t like fights, he walked out of the room when it got too much and that was it, fight over just like that. Sometimes he left the room early just so the argument would stop, and return just as the voices fell with an amused smile on his face. “I was just getting my spectacles cleaning cloth,” he’d say, “are you guys done?”

 _God,_ she misses Bruce.

“Anthony Stark, everybody!”

He’s up on the stage, all flourishes and glittering charm, and the thing about it is that she wouldn’t know how he’s doing from this angle. No one would, because that’s what he’s the best at, and you can’t point out a single flaw in him on stage. He’s been in the spotlight too long to make stupid mistakes. He’s been in the spotlight too long to make _mistakes_. She’s not going to get any useful data from this.

Sure, she could look at how the sunglasses are tinted darker, at how there’s not a single mention of the Avengers, but all you could really gain from that is that he’s working himself to the bone and he’s hurting, and she knows this. Anyone who knows him well enough knows this—this is how he manages grief.

And then he looks straight at her. She knows this because she knows people. Her entire life has practically been an advanced study of people, and this is a person looking straight at her. He doesn’t stumble over his speech even once, doesn’t give any indication that there’s an Accords criminal (such a harsh term, but there it is) in the room, just keeps on performing. Her burner phone buzzes in her hand.

_Miss me, Agent Romanov?_

**Washington DC**

It’s been five years or more since she’s been to a good fancy celebration. This one? She deserves it, after that fiasco with Thanos and the Infinity Stones, and _throwing herself off a cliff_. Not her best moment, said Bruce, now merged into the Hulk, what the hell. She disagreed with him about the fact, even though he did bring her back and she’s grateful. She doesn’t quite know how exactly it happened, but the boys had waved it off with a collective, “We Hate Magic Stuff!”

She has these weird moments of consciousness sometimes, when she can’t quite believe that she’s alive. When she looks at her hands and remembers letting go of the rocks, Clint’s face above her. When she looks at the blood-drenched gear she’d died and come back to life just in time for the final battle in, just for that unique perspective. When she relives the sick crunch and the split-second pain of hitting the ground in her worst nightmares.

Yeah, winning doesn’t mean they’re all right, but the little moments make it all worth it.

The big ones aren’t bad either, she thinks as she surveys the room lit up, golden. As she looks at all the people dancing, all the people eating, all the people _living_. She sips at her champagne delicately, and smiles when she sees Clint dragging Lila onto the dance floor as Laura laughs.

“This is nice,” says Steve.

“Still wanna go back to the 1930s? Margaret Carter got married, you know.”

He looks sheepish. “Yeah, that idea has been scrapped. It’s best to not mess around with time any more than we already have.”

“I could’ve told you that ages ago, Cap. You were just being stupid.”

“That’s what Bucky said, too. He said I wouldn’t be able to survive without Sticky Notes, and the internet, and I should get some brain in my head before it was too late.”

“He was right,” she says. “So, what’re you going to do with your life?”

“Uh, heavy question, Ms. Romanoff. Carry on, I think. Mentor any new superheroes that need mentoring, take kittens out of tress on the weekends, be a good uncle to Morgan, make more art. Are those okay goals? I think they’re okay goals?”

“As long as you don’t permanently give Morgan your shield, we’ll be fine. Remember how Tony asked for the shield for experiments?”

“I think Pepper will keep watch if they try to do something with it,” Steve grins at her. “I mean, if you can’t trust Pepper Potts to keep people in order, you might as well just give up.”

“Truer words have never been spoken,” Tony remarks dryly from behind them. “You guys having fun?”

“Come here, we’re trying to figure out how to spend the rest of our lives,” she tells him. His red and gold metal arm, courtesy of the Infinity Gauntlet, whirrs as he tips his sunglasses down to look at them, like a secretary in a 50s film.

“That’s a topic. I guess it’s all going to be full of the kids, you know, the kids and the bots and the wife. God knows Morgan’s a handful, and then everyone keeps spoiling her. And there’s Harley and Peter, who spoil her further. I’m going to be busy. I think I’ll have to learn how to bake.”

She has a sudden mental picture of the Iron Man suit in an apron, taking a cake out of the oven. It’s a hilarious thing.

“So you’re retired?” Steve asks, and she doesn’t think she’s imagining the high, worried pitch. Tony laughs when he sees the look on her face, reading it well.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give up the Suit, so semi-retired, calm down, Rogers.”

“Of course, how was that even a question?” Bruce rests a gentle hand on Tony’s shoulder. “Tony here wouldn’t know what life meant if he didn’t give people heart attacks on the regular.”

“You look like a broccoli,” says Tony flatly.

She knows Clint’s at her back because she can hear his footsteps approaching, and Thor’s cutting a wide swathe through the dance floor with ebullient movements as he reaches them.

“How are we still alive?” Her favourite archer asks, and she hears his grin in his voice. “Seriously, guys.”

“Luck?” Bruce’s glasses shine opaque when the light hits them directly. “It’s the only option, and I’m a man of science.”

“I think it’s God,” says Steve, predictably, and as Tony scoffs, Thor says, “Which one do you talk about? There were many before, even more so than there are now.”

“We’re puzzling out how we’re still alive, Thor.”

“Our strength as a whole,” answers Thor.

“Eh, not bad,” says Clint. “I’d give you seven dollars for that answer.”

“Maybe because we’re Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?” She suggests, and smiles. She’s still a spy, yes, but maybe some heroes can be multitaskers. There’s a chorus of ‘maybes’ and then Clint cracks a joke and some time later, she’s getting pulled to the dance floor as her black gown swishes around her prettily.

When it’s the speech portion of the event, she adjusts her flashcards on the lectern before her. She doesn’t need to, she’s prepared. She remembers being a young girl thinking that she’d do anything to help children but her hopes being dashed by the apparent eternity that was the Red Room. Maybe she’s an optimist now. Yelena would be happy, she thinks. She can be a philanthropist, too.

She announces The Natasha Romanoff Home for Children in Need to wild applause.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! I'm crimson-noir on tumblr.


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